Of Diversions and Arrivals

You can't get there from here. No one actually ever said it, but one of the things bout traveling through the Holy Land is that you rarely travel in a straight line. Sometimes it's geography that gets in the way. Visiting the places that Jesus knew around the Sea of Galilee involves driving around the lake, unless you have access to a boat. The drive from Ein Gedi on the Dead Sea to Bethlehem looks like a straight shot, until you realize that the rock hewn mountains and stone strewn wadis of the Judean Desert are in the way. And even in Jerusalem itself, you find yourself traveling round in circles, circumnavigating the Old City time and time again, even though it would be almost quicker to travel through on foot.
One of the things that you realize when you read the Gospel according to St Mark, is that Jesus rarely travels in straight lines either. But it's not just because of the geography. From the time that he goes into the wilderness after his baptism, right to the time he is arrested, Jesus is driven by the Holy Spirit to do the work of God (Thanks to the Rev Dr Christopher King for this insight, in one of the many conversations among the pilgrims this last week). Deep down, most of us, I suspect, think that life should go in straight lines. But the reality is that life rarely works out like that. There are innumerable twists and turns and diversions. Often it is incredibly frustrating, as we look at where we want to go, but somehow can't get there from where we are. Yet looking back at our lives, we often find that what we thought were detours in fact took us places we needed to go, without which we would not be the people we have become. And sometimes we can even see the hand of God in them.
The pilgrimage to the Holy Land is over. I began this blog entry in the bus traveling through Jerusalem; I'm finishing it in an office on Long Island. I have a suspicion that the pilgrimage will, in time, prove to be one of those detours that will shape my life in unexpected ways. If nothing else, the process of pilgrimage teaches you to let go of your own illusion of control and receive the unexpected as a gift, trusting that God will lead you in straight paths and detours alike.

Experiencing unity and division

Church this morning was at  the Anglican (Episcopal) Cathedral of St George in East Jerusalem, on the Arab side of the city.  Just a couple of blocks away, the wall marks the boundary with the Palestinian West Bank.  Walking towards the Old city from the Cathedral, you travel along a busy street, lined with Arab shops and market stalls, and after passing into the Old City through the Damascus Gate, you find yourself on the boundary between the Muslim Quarter on the left and the Christian Quarter on the right, though there is no visible difference between the two.

Mostly at home, when we hear about Israel, we hear about Jewish Israelis on the one hand and Muslim Palestinians on the other.  But rarely do we hear about the people caught in between: the 170,000 or so Palestinian or Arab Christians, like Isaac, who owns a shop near the Cathedral.   Isaac is Israeli; he also happens to be Arab and Christian.  His parents' home was in West Jerusalem, now a Jewish area; after the 1948 war they were forced to move east. When the wall dividing the West Bank from Israel proper was built, Isaac's home ended up on the wrong side.  It's only two blocks from his shop, but is behind the wall.  He has had to make a choice - live in his home, and forgo his Israeli identity and his livelihood, or keep his shop and live with his wife and children in one room in the Old City.  He has chosen the latter, and so his home lies empty and may eventually be bulldozed.  

This morning the Eucharist was celebrated in two languages.  At times it alternated between English and Arabic.  The sermon was preached twice, once in each language.  We sang the hymns and said the responses in our own languages, English and Arabic simultaneously.  And at for end, we went into the parish hall for cake and Turkish coffee.   It was truly a taste of the time to come when, as Isaiah says, "On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well aged wines..." (Isaiah 25:6).   Pray for our brothers and sisters in the Middle East, and for the peace of Jerusalem. 

Humbly I adore thee...

One of the first things that strikes you as you enter the city of Jerusalem through the Lion Gate is the golden glow that emanates from the buidlings.  It's simply light falling on the sand-gold limestone that the buildngs are made of, but it almost seems as if the city itself has a halo, inviting you to reverence and worship.

As we walked the Via Dolorosa today, I was struck by the multiple forms of reverence shown throughout the ages and even today.  In the Crusader church of St Ann, our voices resounded long after we stopped singing, the echoes revoicing our praise.  A jumbled pile of large crosses by the ninth station bears testimony to the Friday tradition of carrying a cross while following in the footsteps of our Savior.  In a small church, an Ethiopian priest kept vigil, wrapped in a traditional shawl of black with maroon stripes. And in the church of the Holy Sepulcher, women in headscarfs chatted loudly to one another, black-clad Orthodox priests lined the route of a procession, people knelt and kissed the holy places, others lit candles and offered them in prayer, and still others stood in reverent silence.

Reverence lies in the act of worshipping or paying homage to Christ.  We do it when we sing and when we pray, when we genuflect or make the sign of the cross, even when we dress in our Sunday best.   And yet each of these can become perfunctory, habitual actions that have lost their essential connection with our Savior.  It's at times like these that being exposed to other, less familiar forms of reverence invites us to a new experience of worship and awe.

Shabbat Shalom in Jerusalem

Today, when we returned to the hotel in Jerusalem after a busy day visiting Masada and the Dead Sea, the lobby was full of little girls in black party dresses, white tights, and black Mary Janes, brothers in black trousers and white shirts, and their parents, preparing to celebrate the Sabbath.  Extended families gathered in the downstairs dining room, while upstairs, a rabbi with long curls and white robe and cap taught a group of young adults the Sabbath rituals. And at another table in the lobby, three preteen boys in khakis and sneakers seem to be arguing with an older sister about what card game to play, while a younger kid in a plaid shirt begs to be allowed to join in. If the babble of voices and laughter is any indication, this is a joyous time to be savored, in which family and faith are inextricably entwined.

As Christians, our the closest thing to the Sabbath is Sunday.  For most of us, the days of roast dinner - or pasta and meatballs - for Sunday lunch - are long gone.  And I don't think I'd want to go back to the days of blue laws and enforced churchgoing three times each Sunday. But I wonder if we have lost something in the process. Sundays are busy, filled with soccer or shopping or the incessant demands of chores.  Family and faith so easily become relegated to the time left over, or perhaps even displaced altogether.  And even when we make them a priority, they are often marked by sullen teenagers and harassed parents and overtired toddlers.  And I wonder, what can we take home for our own weekly celebration of the resurrection?

Boundaries and Identity

One of the things you notice as you travel throughout Israel is the closeness of the borders.  On Tuesday, we travelled up into the Golan Heights to the Valley of Tears, where  a major battle in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 was fought.  Less than an hour's drive from the Sea of Galilee, you stand and look past three abandoned tanks into Syria.  Earlier in the day, we had looked north-west to Lebanon.  Today we traveled down the Jordan Valley.  To our left, sometimes within 30 feet, was a double fence, electrified, with land mines in between.  Along it runs a sandy track, which is checked several times each day for the footprints of border-crossers from Jordan.  

On our way from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, we crossed the border - and the wall - into Palestinian territory.  Neither our guide nor our driver, who are Israeli, could enter; we had to pick up a new guide and driver for our time there. As we waited at the border to cross back into Israel, with machine gun toting soldiers passing through the bus, I was aware that for those residents of Bethlehem, who work in Jerusalem, just a couple of miles away, this is an everyday occurrence, and for Israeli Jew and Palestinian alike, it is a restriction and ofttimes indignity.

Whether you are Jewish, Palestinian, or non-religious living in Israel, you cannot avoid the understanding that you live among your traditional enemies.  And that has been the case for thousands of years.   Set at the crossroads between Europe, Asia and Africa, this land has often been fought over.  Abraham entered a land that had been long  settled by Canaanites; Moses led the people of God back to a promised land settled by Jebusites and Hittites and Hivites; David and Solomon had to defeat the Philistines; the prophets spoke to those who had experienced the land-hunger of the Babylonians and Persians and Assyrians.  And Jesus lived in a country occupied by the Romans.

Against all that opposition, identity has always been something for which it was necessary to fight. Clear boundaries have been necessary - of language, law, and culture.  As you travel this land you begin to understand why law and covenant were so important, setting a people apart for God.  Here, identity has always been inexorably entwined with religion.  And the faith that has grown in this soil is passionate and fiercely loyal to the God who calls it forth.

Which makes me wonder, what of our faith?  For most of us, it has not been born in the context of enmity.  Being Christian in America, we don't need such rigorous boundaries to maintain our faith.  Most of our neighbors really don't care who or what we believe in.  And the danger is that we too may cease to care.

Accretions...

Today we visited Tel Megiddo, an archaeological site where there are 26 or thereabouts (depending on which archaeologist you believe) layers of civilization.  Inhabited from about 7000 BC to 586 BC, it is a mound created by fortress built upon fortress.  The remains include an early Canaanite settlement with its large circular altar, a circular communal grain pit from its time as an Israelite fortress, and stables with stone drinking troughs from the reigns of Solomon and Ahab.

Later in the day, as I was walking through the town of Tiberias, I realized that most of the Christian sites that we have seen are layered like Tel Megiddo.  The top layer is almost always a church, sometimes Roman Catholic, sometimes Greek Orthodox.  Down a layer maybe a Crusader church, or perhaps a Byzantine one.  Finally, perhaps down another couple of layers, are remains that date to the time of Christ.  Sometimes it's a village, or a rock, or a well; sometimes accessible, sometimes hidden behind a gate or under the floor.  Somewhere down there is a place that Jesus might actually have lived or visited.

Sometimes our faith is like Tel Megiddo.  Way down at the bottom is the heart of our faith, our relationship with Jesus Christ himself.  Sometimes that dates to our childhood; sometimes it is much more recent.  But since then, layers have built up over that initial experience.  The liturgical traditions that have become meaningful to us, the hymns that we love, the architecture that speaks to us, and the people who have shared our journey all shape our experience of faith.  But there are times when those accretions threaten to overwhelm our core relationship; it is at those times that we need to stop and take time to simply talk with our Savior.

Meanwhile, I'm looking forward to Bethlehem, where apparently we will go down a long flight of stairs and see the exact place where Jesus was born.  Maybe.

Fierce Landscapes

I'd always heard that Israel was a land of contrasts. But I'd always thought that was the classic cliched hyperbole that you expect from tourist advertising.  Of course there are contrasts - few countries are geographically uniform.  But what is striking is the sheer magnitude of the differences within a few miles.  From the shores of the Sea of Galilee to the fertile headwaters of the Jordan to the abandoned Syrian tanks of the Golan Heights takes little more than an hour to drive.

Somehow - I imagine thanks to my Children's Illustrated Bible - I had imagined this to be a more pastoral land, echoing the gentler contours of New England rather than the harsher reality of a land formed of volcanic eruption, earthquake, and erosion.

Imagine Jesus sailing on a lake that one moment is mirror still, and the next whipped by winds tearing past a hill that looks like it has been attacked with a meat cleaver, walking northwards through green fields spattered with stone, along a marshy stream that eventually becomes the Jordan River, and towards the cliff face in whose shadow the city of Caesarea Philippi was built, and where Peter confessed that Jesus was the Christ.  His own understanding of himself and his mission must have been shaped by these places.  No wonder that the Jesus of the gospels is not so much "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild"  as a man of passion and grace in equal measure, one who healed a synagogue leader's beloved daughter and spoke woe on the scribes and the pharisees.

About ten years ago I read a book called "The Solace of Fierce Landscapes" by Belden Lane.  In it, he speaks of the relationship between spirituality and landscape: the ways in which the way we experience God is shaped by our environment.  The extremes of the land echo the extremes of our lives, birth and death, and their reverberations in between.  And so often, it is in those extreme and liminal places that we not only meet God, but find our faith reshaped and renewed. 

Blisters and blessings

Recently, I received a gift.  It was a small paper crown, with one word written inside it - longanimity. It was the Sunday after the Epiphany.  The priest in the church I visited invited each member of the congregation to take one of these crowns from a basket, and to receive the word written therein as a gift from God, to be lived with all year.  I had to look up my word in the dictionary.  It means "A disposition to bear injuries patiently" or "calmness in the face of suffering and adversity."  I don't like my word.

But in the weeks since I received it, I've learned to live with it.  And I've realized that it has a lot to do with the way you deal with the way you travel through life.

We Christians often talk about that journey through life as being a pilgrimage.   However, I sometimes think that we use the word metaphorically, without thinking what pilgrimage is really like. When I think of pilgrimages, I think of richly colored medieval paintings, red and blue and green with gold leaf, people walking sturdily towards a golden-roofed city.

But in the last couple of years, I've walked two pilgrimage trails: St Cuthbert's Way in Scotland and north-eastern England, and Two Saints Way from Chester to Litchfield, also in England.  They have not been like the medieval pictures in my head.  My clothing is not rich red and blue and green with gold leaf.  I have well-worn gray boots, gray shorts, a washed out blue T-shirt, and a gray hat.  They're chosen for their practicality - they're quick to dry and don't show the dirt.

And my walking is not so sturdy, certainly not by the time I'm within sight of my destination.  Limping would be a better word for it.  No matter how good my preparations, walking 15 or so miles a day means that I get blisters.  You learn to live with them, but you can't forget them.

But that's not the whole story of pilgrimage.  When I crested the last hill before the sea, and saw Holy Island, when I received the Eucharist in a church where my ancestors were married and buried, when I stood on the windswept moors where St Cuthbert visited his parishioners, when I received unexpected hospitality - a short car ride, a cup of tea, a pint of beer - I knew the tangible blessing of God.


The pilgrimage we are on as Christians is one characterized by both blisters and blessings.  Jesus never promised us that it would be easy.  In fact, he has invited us to take on his yoke, to bear the cross, to rejoice in suffering - not as some sort of masochistic hazing ritual, but as full participation in the often strenuous and sometimes costly work of God that, in the words of Romans 8:1-5, produces endurance and character and hope, and in the end, a share in the glory of God.  Or, in the words of the well known hymn,
Bane and blessing, pain and pleasure,
By the cross are sanctified;
Peace is there that knows no measure,
Joys that through all time abide.
John Bowring, 1825

Longanimity is about the blisters.  And it seems that as soon as one heals, my shoes begin to rub again.    But every time I crest another hill, I know the even greater blessings of the glorious grace of God.